Prism provides guidance in the form of samples and documentation that help you easily design and build rich, flexible, and easily maintained Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications. Using design patterns that embody important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling, Prism helps you to design and build applications using loosely…

Copyright is a form of protection grounded in the US Constitution and granted by law for original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. WRONG: If an image is on the Internet/Bing it is in the public domain WRONG: If there is no copyright notice, I don’t need permission WRONG: If I…

Visual Studio (and many other Microsoft Products) uses http://UserVoice.com as a feedback mechanism for users to suggest and vote on product features. One of the most popular features, with 3,752 votes, a new “?.” operator for the C# language, sometimes called the Safe Navigation Operator. The news Rejoice. Yesterday, Tuesday, February 25, 2014, on the…

In college, a millennia ago, I spent a summer serving Philadelphia’s inner city children with Bart Campolo. As a leader, he was an effervescent, tireless motivator; an excellent writer as much a speaker. As he verbalized his process he forever transformed my approach to public communication. He explained two reasons for communication. The first, information….

Last year, I sat down with my colleague and friend Daren May for to create a Microsoft Virtual Academy training series that beginner developers could use to get a solid introduction to C#, called Programming in C#. This course steams through the myriad of C# features and concepts, giving a comprehensive survey of the topic…

Outlook.com is awesome. It is super-fast with hyper-advanced features that sort of make Yahoo!, Gmail, and AOL a great fit for your grandparents, but not you. Not tech-savvy you. What’s better is Outlook.com is free. Now you get an awesome web, comprehensive Office Outlook integration, Xbox integration, Windows Phone integration, and Microsoft Account integration for…

Microsoft has a kind of love affair with its developer community. As a result, the Microsoft developer community worldwide is the largest and most cohesive community you could imagine. It was Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, who said, “Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!”. That set the tone for the importance of and relationship with developers to…

November 2013, immediately after the release of Visual Studio 2013, I sat down for an all-day session with Unni Ravindranathan, the Senior Program Manager for Blend. Who better to walk through, not the new features of Blend, but all the core features of Blend – and the new features, too. In some cases, Blend for…

XAML is a very flexible technology platform. This time of year, some of the nicest things you can do is release apps that contain the character of the season. Since I am in Colorado, a lot of that character surrounds the weather. Snow is an easy ambiance to add to any XAML app. In this…

Next week is Christmas. I know most of you are scrambling to find the perfect gift for that special someone. Here’s an idea: a custom app built just for her. What could she love more than vector-based graphics on a touch screen? How she’ll remember this year and bring it up again and again, reminding…